Xfce Wayland Development Roadmap
wiki.xfce.org
wiki.xfce.org
I have my XFCE desktop working as I want now and I don't want to change it or having to learn where buttons are located after an update. With Gnome and Windows I feel like a lab rat for their UI experiments.
XFCE started as a clone of CDE. Now compare original CDE with XFCE and it is not really the same thing.
Sure, Gnome change from v2 to v3 was a major change in UI, but mostly for the better and Gnome kept a way to have a more classic behavior.
I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately and Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly for those looking for a gnome classic evolution that no one was really forced into using gnome 3.
Yeah it did. They announced gnome 3 and deprecated 2 on the same day, and seemed to have made the deliberate choice to not allow them to coexist. As soon as your distro moved, bam, you were done.
> Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly
After some months. This stuff was not there on day 1.
In the mean time, those of us who did not want to work the way Gnome 3 decided we should, had to find an alternative. And when we found a good one (Xfce for me), we stuck with it.
GNOME makes often changes without long term strategy or asking their actual users. The removal of Type-Ahead-Find in Nautilus or background-transparency in GNOME-Terminal where mistakes. On the other hand new applications like Documents or Console required resources but provide no benefit over it counterparts. That said - Nautilus improved a lot in recent years and there are even patches available for Type-Ahead-Find (or Navigation). Same for background-transparency in the GNOME-Terminal. The separated top-bar-menus were also a problem (decoupling menus from application-windows was copied from Apple) but now reverted, they learn.
If the design team is aware of the usage and has a plan things fit well! The overview is great for keyboard and mouse users, the dash make simple things simple, they got rid of the useless desktop-metapher (copied from Win95) and also the system-tray (another thing from Win95). The keyboard focused use of GNOME is use core-feature, fast for experienced users and a relieve for novice users. The GNOME-Shell provided a good UI and removed many questionable ideas of the past.
Wishlist?
Decouple the release cycle of most applications from GNOME, excepting Nautilus and Settings. There is no need to couple Epiphany, Terminal, Maps, Calendar and so. Evolution already skips every second release. And feature-removal should require a good reasoning and not just „I don’t need that myself“. Many options are bewildering, many forks without merges are worse (lost developers and lost users).
Gnome feels very anti Unix philosophy.
Either way, many package managers provide groups or patterns to make it easier for an end user to maintain their system. Pacman does have such a feature.
Look, for example, do you prefer to be able to install SDDM just because you like the themeing capabilities, and be able to do so, with just the bare minimum packages; or, install GDM and having to pull the whole GNOME DE as a requirement?
It's purpose is to provide and manage account information for applications that need it, so the user doesn't have to configure their email, calendar, whatever, in each application separately. With each application storing passwords in a who knows where, or each implementing their Gmail OAuth.
So it is quite logical, that application that uses accounts will also need gnome-online-accounts.
'Do one thing and do it well` -- how is that anti Unix philosophy?
GNOME has a keyring system service for storing passwords, so it's not necessary to get the entire desktop shell to access the keyring.
GOA is for storing account information: e.g. you configure your Gmail/nextcloud/whatever account once, and then all apps that need it can access it. So your Geary, Contacts and Calendar (separate applications) do not need each to implement account management and account specific auth flows -- not just passwords, OAuth is all the rage nowadays. And I, as the user, do not have to keep tokens in each app current.
It is also not 'entire gnome shell`. Just the required components.
here the required dependency list for control center on arch: accountsservice bolt colord-gtk4 cups-pk-helper gcr gnome-bluetooth-3.0 gnome-color-manager gnome-desktop-4 gnome-online-accounts gnome-settings-daemon gnome-shell gsettings-desktop-schemas gsound gtk4 libadwaita libgnomekbd libgtop libgudev libibus libmalcontent libmm-glib libnma-gtk4 libpwquality smbclient sound-theme-freedesktop udisks2 upower
while it may follow the letter of the philosophy is certainly doesn't feel like it's following the intent of it. the components form a sort of cyclic graph, where technically you can install any component but soon you'll find that you need all the others with no viable alternative component that will work reasonably well.
using these component outside of the DE feel like being a second class citizen that will be kicked out at any update, and then you'll have to scavenge for information from unofficial sources and the source code for what has changed that broke your setup.
Applications which are part of GNOME itself probably try to remain small and integrate well into GNOME e.g. Nautilus and Evolution. Applications which aren’t part of GNOME like Gimp or Geeqie rely only Gtk.
It just hurts if you want use a integrated GNOME-Application with a sole window-manager. That makes sense and we shouldn’t blame the developers for modularity and re-using.
I don’t know about Type-Ahead-Find in Nautilus, but typing to search in the file choosers is comically bad.
“Comically bad” here goes slightly beyond not working right to mildly destructive. I don’t know how the software pulls it off, but trying to open a folder found by Tracker search shows a nonsensical UI (no, I don’t want to “replace” the folder) and sometimes removes the x bit from the folder mode. I don’t even know how. A random chmod(2) call deep in glib? Why would the file chooser ever use chmod or fchmod?
Not really, even with Plugins everything is handled by Mutter - you don't have the modularity of Gnome 2 where you can switch out the panel, file browser or window manager as you please.
Fortunately Mate forked Gnome 2 to retain the old desktop.
Despite being in the package list for fedora(?) on recent versions, It fails to install and talk on the bug thread is just to remove the packages from the repo.
As for Xfce changing, that is to be expected since people's needs change over time. It is simply nice when those changes are gradual and not radical.
It's not clear at all - Wayland is in some ways a regression compared to X (try writing your own WM - tinyWM is 50 LOC, whereas the Wayland equivalent TinyWL is over 1000), and doesn't just "improve" X but changes paradigm entirely.
I'd like to see [Arcan](https://www.arcan-fe.com) be the future, it seems more elegant than Wayland.
Say what now? Gnome 3 is such a shitshow that I switched to XFCE because of it.
I only miss 3 column tiling on my ultra wide screen.
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Moved-Your-Cheese-Someone-Business/dp...
[1] - https://www.bkconnection.com/static/I_Moved_Your_Cheese_EXCE...
cheese moving, in this context, is not a force of nature. it's something that other people do upon you, and they could elect not to
This is not to detract from XFCE, which is a cool project with many strengths as well, and certainly deserving of enthusiastic users (doesn't matter which FOSS desktop you love, we all win).
I really, really wanted to like KDE as it's super powerful otherwise.
So I'd say it's worth checking back, and certainly the developers/contributors take your ask seriously enough to vote for it themselves.
You would probably have to change your keybindings a little but otherwise it's very similar... before the Wayland part
Switching from i3 to Sway kept 90% of the same config for me, changing only keybinds and output configuration.
Keybinds are mostly the same, just some arguments for 'bindsym' don't make sense with Wayland.
I did have to override args/env for some things to truly do Wayland, but that's shortening every day
It supports X too, but you'll find oddities with copying/pasting between native Wayland and X things
I'm increasingly tempted to grab a simple Wayland compositor and "bolt on" a minimalist X implementation directly on it to also allow X connections with just enough of the protocol implemented to allow running some simpler X WMs (but I'd love it if someone beat me to it).
For WMs with lots of fancy stuff it'd can take quite a bit of the X API to support, but a simple X WM doesn't typically use that many request types (I just looked at i3's source, and it's X interactions are pretty simple...
They recently moved to gtk4 (or are planning to?). I wonder what would be the difference between gtk3 and gtk4 apps in terms of latency and performance.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6
I think 4 plans to kill theming too.
Not having to periodically scrape the crud off the rollers has been such a boon to me.
Such a person may have used a desktop, but desktops are foreign to them.
Killing theming and removing features when they do not have a serviceable usable alternative does not make it more "accessible", it is just the standard "we know it better because we study the behavior of a large group of users" excuse that they give to treat it everyone by the lowest common denominator - just like Apple.
That being said, I will shamefully echo the words of the GNOME maintainers; their goal was not to "kill theming". They wanted to stop distros from shipping themes by default, which was arguably just as deranged but at least somewhat understandable. Nowadays we have stuff like Gradience too, which lets you theme LibAdwaita apps. You're still forced to use the ugly old Adwaita buttons, though.
So... make of it as you will. I left GNOME completely after the GNOME 40 update, I sympathize with people who hate the current desktop. The toolkit itself is "fine" in my unprofessional developer opinion.
Funny how with anything on the internet there's always Ayes and Nays. It's almost hilarious to me about humans that "the market always segments" into all these trivial seeming (but decidedly important if you have skin in the game) choices.
I'm not questioning at all the importance of UI and UX in any way. It's fundamental. These visual virtual environments are the primary tools we humans use every day for our information manipulation snow-shoveling knowledge work. They have to be refined and have exquisite ergonomics tailored to our every whim. That's undeniable and it's not surprising at all that people have strong preferences.
I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments.
Example from my business: we build a remote browser that has a kind of real time streaming optimized for adapting many bandwidth conditions to reduce lag (which often occurs by trading away raw framerate). For some people (normally the security conscious crowd), this is perfect. For other people (the app virtualization crowd) this is terrible: they want silky smooth high framerate remote streaming. I suppose people get could lectures about trade-offs, but it really is a kind of enjoyable thing: there's always something to work on.
An advantage of being open source is people can tweak it to their needs as much as they want. There's no bottlenecks in the system besides what you want to do, and how much compute and bandwidth you can throw at it. It can be as fast and smooth, or as resource efficient and minimal as you want.
Hahaha, really? It's been my desktop since I started using Linux in the 2000s. It's great! It presents windows, has a small set of high quality built in applications (file browser, application launcher, etc), has a big and flexible set of keyboard shortcuts, and other than that, it just gets out of your way.
Other DEs like to shove themselves in your way -- put your mouse in the corner of the screen? Something shows up! Hit a wrong keyboard button? Something shows up! Open the application launcher? It's fullscreen, baby! Do something to a window? Here's some jiggly wiggly animations!
XFCE just does what it needs to do, quietly, with no fuss. It's fantastic.
> I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments.
Well, I guess I'm just proving your point :)
Now I just need hardware to run it on local. Can you suggest some? M1 ARM is out...so what should I get?
At one point in time I used it because I couldn't afford a decent computer and XFCE used fewer resources (so my slow computer would be a little more responsive). Eventually I went back to it because it was familiar and it gets the job done.
If XFCE ever adopts the GTK4 ugly topbar cancer I'll switch to KDE and the entire K application suite and never run a GTK application again.
Really hope that Wayland integration works well for them.
Both are pretty dumb when it comes to Hi-DPI support although Cinnamon does an acceptable job at staying coherent when configured with bigger fonts so it’s a workaround. XFCE manages bigger fonts very badly so I have big hopes that real Hi-DPI support will be better with wayland.
Wobbly Windows are amazing and never get old. It's been years, and I still get joy from them.
I'm sure there are other nice effects too, but I don't feel that strongly about them - Wobbly Windows are the hill I'd die on.
And in gnome's case you can just disable animations in Settings-->Accessibility-->Seeing-->Reduce animation
If applications are written in GTK2/3/4, fractional scaling won't work well and lead to blurry windows.
Integer scaling (1x, 2x, 4x) should work just fine, but fractional scaling isn't implemented consistently across GUI frameworks. Hopefully Wayland will fix the inconsistencies between implementations, though GTK and some other GUI frameworks will likely remain broken for a while.
If you need multi-decade support from your GUI layer, I can recommend raw Win32 or VT100 terminal codes. There's hardly any other API with that kind of backwards compatibility.
It take 2-3 years to iron out the bugs. Non-gnome downstream take another 3 years to adopt and stabilise.
By the time the adoption is finished, another major version emerges.
We don't have any good way to maintain compatibility that long.
X11/Xlib, though obviously you have to do the GUI bits yourself (but then you mentioned VT100 terminal codes so i guess that is acceptable).
Also AFAIK Motif is backwards compatible going back to the 90s.
While Windows doesn’t provide a unified GUI toolkit, win32 UI controls of different generations can be mixed freely within an application, enabling gradual upgrades.
*Usually, not always.
A GTK 2 application compiled 25 years ago usually still runs today, too. Just because GTK 3 is available doesn't mean GTK 2 stopped existing.
I have no specific insight into decision-making in open source organizations, but given that the resources they're working with are several orders of magnitude less it's not surprising to me that they sometimes end up having to choose between stability and new functionality. (While I personally prefer projects towards one end of that spectrum, I'm happy that different projects have different values for other people.)
Qt? 99.99% of the API from Qt 4 (2005) is identical in Qt 6 (ongoing). A few headers were renamed, and a few minor functions, generally stuff you can port in 1 day.
When they released Qt 5 and 6 and decided to switch from Qt Widgets to a new GUI toolkit (QML), they didn't say "umm, just rewrite your whole codebase in QML bro", they kept widgets around in perpetual maintenance mode. This is how you respect your users.
I do not think this is current info, but otherwise might be the reason as it is an experimental feature.
For example, you can enable fractional scaling in GNOME right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjfZ8TSXsps
This phoronix article shows the variable to enable it in GTK.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK-4.11.1
Edit: added a little clarification + cited the specific bit of text I was responding to.
Debian still ships support for token ring; the idea that X11 is ever "going away" really misunderstands how free software works.
However, development of xorg is completely dead so it is pretty likely that distributions will stop support running xorg sessions in the future, and at some point xorg will likely not run on new graphics cards anymore.
KDE has announced plans to discontinue support for running x11 sessions and only runs on wayland in the upcoming plasma 6 version.
For now all the gui toolkits will presumably continue to support x11, but at some point, it is likely that new applications will only care about supporting wayland, and after that, it is possible that future versions of gui toolkits will stop supporting x11.
Maybe "ripping out working code" is a bad thing, but at a certain point people would have to put in extra effort to ensure that x11 stays "working" and if nobody steps up to put in that effort and x11 support breaks, it won't be ripping out "working" code anymore.
I don't think that's true; didn't it just recently get a new maintainer who put out a bug fix release and everything?
- fractional scaling of the display output
- app rendering at fractional scales.
The first one works fine with Gtk 3 and newer; the application renders its output at nearest higher integer scale, and then the compositor downscales it to requested fractional scale (i.e. app renders at 200% and compositor downscales it to 175%). Apple does exactly this same thing (just with slightly different scales; they won't show you nice 150% or 175% for a reason; they optimize for different thing).
The second one is rendering at fractional scales directly by the application; then the compositor doesn't downscale anything, just displays the buffer as it is (i.e. app renders at 175% and compositor displays it as it is). Since rendering at fractional scales is more demanding (just think about fractional mouse coordinates or how to display 1px straight line and don't get lost in the rounding errors), it took longer to materialize. It is this support that will have to wait for Gtk 5.
But meanwhile, your (Gtk) apps will be displayed at fractional sizes using the first method.
Blurryness is often caused by GTK2/old Qt5/Electron applications that don't support Wayland and are rendered using XWayland at 100% and then upscaled by the compositor.
Support for this kind of rendering is going to wait until Gtk 5 -- implementing it in Gtk 4 would break ABI, and then the world would have to listen to cries about Yet Another Breakage. The current system, rendering at integer scale and then compositor-downscale is working fine since Gtk 3. Btw, exactly this way is how Apple does it, and it was lauded as a great way to support scaling.
I also believe this is only the case for Wayland, so X11 users may be out of luck here. Actual fractional support would require breaking API compatibility, which is why integer scaling+downscaling is necessary.
This is a feature
KDE does not spark joy, but then again, most devs and most users have no real artistic sensibility to speak of. Have you ever looked at a random person's desktop? So I don't give weight to anybody that says "it looks good to me."
That said, I am now on KDE after a decade of GNOME because I need some of its configurability, and GNOME is starting to become too opinionated even for me, even though they have a slightly better design team not afraid of colours with more than 20% saturation.
I really start to think that the X11->Wayland migration is a bigger clusterfuck than Python2->3 was - even if we consider that a compositor migration is much bigger task than Python migration.
Not so luck for non-GNOME user
The laptop is flawless, and the desktop only has minor issues with display configuration (order and/or resolution) getting messed up sometimes when waking from sleep. I’m pretty sure that’s an Nvidia driver bug.
Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least)
IDK why, but the way you say it really annoys me. Like disregarding people's experiences because you have not faced the same issues.
Anyway, I try to shift to plasma wayland atleast every month. But there's always these weird graphical issues on nvidia (desktop) that ruin my experience, so i switch back to my x11 session. Even KDE has a page detailing the various problems in wayland https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers
I've been happy with Wayland for most of my Linux desktopping since 2018, so that was a ten year transition from first release to full adoption on my part.
And I'm sure we'll have X11 desktops around for various purposes ten years from now.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480331
(Their main justification is to be resilient to server restarts, but from the client's perspective the two are the same.)
You're welcome to try and convince GTK devs to do the same.
And it takes time to replace an established protocol. Especially when you need to provide a feature-complete fallback for all the applications that are never going to do the switch.
For me that transition has been pain free. First I heard that X is going to be retired, then I saw some development note popping up here and there and then one day I was offered to log in to a Wayland session instead of a X session. I never experienced any problems I could directly attribute to Wayland.
I don't know why Wayland gets so much hate. To me it feels very much like the systemd hate: I don't know why this needs to change; I was happy after all. I don't want to learn about a new thing, so I'm angry.
Yes, it's a very similar situation; in both cases people are really fond of pretending that the only reason you could possibly object is that you hate change just because, while ignoring the actual regressions that it's causing. For instance, Wayland does not support (and probably never will support) some accessibility tools that make my life much easier (because the desktop must be secured against programmatic manipulation).
Nobody is taking X away. You can still run any DE and any application on X if you want to. You're not being restricted in your ability to run applications, quite the contrary; your are being given more options. So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away.
But yeah; ever since Sun stopped founding it, the accessibility situation on Linux has been dire.
That's unfortunately incorrect; so far Waydroid is the only program I've hit that explicitly requires Wayland, but I expect the list to grow with time.
> So even if your use-case is not yet fully supported on Wayland, why hat on it? No one is taking anything away.
Because it's abundantly clear that a noticeable set of devs and maintainers would really like to take it away, or at least refuse to support it (if there's a difference); see ex. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092 where the lead dev on Asahi Linux seems ready to drop Xorg completely until someone points out a11y problems with Wayland, or https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-KDE-Plasma-6-Plan for Fedora looking to drop KDE+X11.
Perhaps you haven't experienced it yourself, but systemd and Wayland have both caused a lot of unjustifiable problems for a lot of people.
That's where the widespread displeasure with them comes from.
It has nothing to do with dealing with change itself or learning something new.
If systemd and Wayland had brought me some tangible benefits, without also bringing me significant pain, then I'd be perfectly happy adopting them like I frequently do for other new-to-me software that makes my life better.
Unfortunately, that's not reality. For example, I've had to deal with far too many Linux installations that no longer boot thanks to systemd (or one of its many components) unexpectedly breaking in one way or another, often after what should be routine updates.
I've never had any success with the Wayland implementations I've tried, either. They've performed horribly on the computers of mine that I've tried them on, to the point of being pretty much unusable. A default installation of X on the same Linux installations works much better and is completely usable, however.
Based on all of the mailing list emails, forum postings, chat logs, bug reports, articles, and other online material that I've seen while trying to sort out such problems with systemd or Wayland, it's clear to me that I'm not the only one experiencing such troubles.
Even if I hadn't experienced such problems, neither systemd nor Wayland would benefit me in any meaningful way. At best, they're merely replacing what I've already been using for years or even decades, rather than improving upon them.
the more important thing is ... not a lot of people stepped up to maintain the old ways. if they are so superior, why isn't there a big group doing it?
...
that said, yes, systemd is crap, it's an endless pile of C instead of the previous [ba]sh bonanza, but it works, and it does a lot of things, and the maintainers are active and doing a lot of good things. plus it's finally standardized across distros.
and any talk about Wayland or X is completely irrelevant as the bugs that frustrate users are not in the protocols, all of them are in the implementations. I, like many starry eyed nix users, motivated to grow the bazaar [had many attempts at contributing] by opening issues, reporting bugs, trying to debug stuff, using beta/dev/nightly/canary/RC stuff ... but it did not make much of a difference. there's just not enough dev bandwidth to deal with even trivial stuff.
I mean it's sometimes* after wake up it's impossible to interact with the Gnome lockscreen with the keyboard unless first clicking on it with the mouse, on Xfce sometimes after opening the lid the screen is visible, and on KDE ... well, on KDE I don't even know what bug I tried to report, but no, fuck Bugzilla.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3135
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4858 [something solved]
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=251935 [on xfce just uninstall "light locker"]
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingScreenLocking#Known_bugs [it's just madness]
And why these problems happen? Because the stack is ossified as fuck, because complexity is through the roof (due to hardware frontrunning the whole show by a (?) decade), and because OS developers being, well, folks who in their infinite wisdom stick to C and C++ and even introducing JS to the stack. (And many people remember when Ballmer-peak Microsoft tried to move to something memory safe, but couldn't... because "it was too hard". Yeah, just hacking everything together somehow is always the smart solution.)
AFIK this problem was solved ~2 years ago when Nvidia added support for GBM in version 495.44 (https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en...)
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-wlroots-Secondar...
What do I like? It's never forced me to change the way I work. That's up to me.
So if Wayland is the future, then I look forward to using XFCE on Wayland somewhere down the line too.
Probably the main thing I'm missing from KDE is being able fo use Super+Number to switch between windows, i.e. Super+1 switches to the window at the first position in the taskbar, etc.. I've been searching around, but haven't found anything that'd be 100%. Would anyone happen to have a solution by any chance?
nth=1; wmctrl -i -a $( wmctrl -l | awk '$2 == "0" { print $1 }' | sed -n "${nth}p" )
I have used it for 7 years and I love it !
May God keep away animations from XCFE allways !
The only thing I don't like is thunar freezing often when doing long blocking IO operations...
- It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).
- We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor
This should tell you everything. Since the Wayland ecosystem is extremely developer hostile it cements the KDE/GNOME duopoly and eliminates the long tail. XFCE might maybe make the push to Wayland but after that that's it. The rest of the tail is dead.
It's usually a lot easier to make a compositor/WM with unusual or innovative behavior on the Wayland stack than it was with X11 in general, as far less behavior is presumed/baked-into either the display server or the existing applications. For example, apps not being able to introspect or manipulate their global coordinates also means the compositor can arrange them however it wants without breaking app assumptions, which enables fancy new layouts.
There's prominent libraries that make compositor development easier, for example wlroots and QtWayland -- XFCE is also using wlroots. "Punt it to a library" isn't radically different from "punt it to Xorg", even if the slicing is a little different.
The tail looks alive and well.
That's a reasonable expectation, but it turns out the slicing does matter. For example: With Xorg, setxkbmap will always work to change the keyboard layout on the fly. Now, wlroots does support configuring the keyboard layout, but it turns out the compositor has to actually hook that functionality up, so if I try out a new compositor that looks neat, I can quickly discover that there's actually literally no way to change the keyboard layout because the developer hasn't gotten around to adding that yet. This is not a hypothetical example.
Now get off my lawn.
I switched to xfce not so long ago after almost 15 years of using KDE for that slow pace exactly. I had small problems and annoyances with KDE on nvidia for a long time but it got worse over time and reached a breaking point lately. Not even talking about Wayland.
Anyways, I am happy to have a rock solid and stable alternative like xfce.
Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition HDR + variable refresh Fractional scaling (I think XFCE has some/all of this?)
We're just playing catchup to MacOS for over a decade, and soon enough Linux will have to compete with 3d desktop environments (Apple Vision Pro interface). I think we're almost to the point where the DE will be just a physics simulator (game engine) to help augment your reality.
Anyway, I still use XFCE on resource-limited hardware but Gnome has been the only option for a while because progress isn't being made by other DEs on these critical things (color, refresh, alpha-composition, and some wayland protocols missing in wlroots).
I'm just glad Gnome isn't the dependency hell it used to be, and has slimmed down. I really love what they've done with GJS but I believe there's a competing KDE bindings project.
</naive>
[1] even window maker could do it, I saw it was recently updated.
The move to Wayland is interesting to observe. On first glance it seems that moving to Wayland provides a load of burden on DEs that they never had before - and not just because of the work required to transition. And that obviously this is all Wayland's fault.
What I think is actually going on though is that we expect quite a rich feature set from a modern DE - exactly as you have listed.
We could never do most of this stuff on X, but Wayland enables it and then follows a load of work to get it all going.
In an ideal world there would be a nice clean abstraction boundary between compositor and DE so that this underlying work was shared between DEs. Maybe that is possible, but people who know what they're talking about seem to agree that the Wayland approach is the right way to go and I don't know enough to disagree. Plus, it makes some intuitive sense that your DE should know how windows share rendering space.
Not sure what's ideal about that. With Wayland the DE IS the compositor. There are a lot of benefits to that. I would hope basic compositing is a fairly small amount of code and many DEs could build on that - which I guess would your clean boundary even if it's in the same process.
It makes for complex, significant work for any Wayland DE, with less shared work. I don't think this is wrong - it seems this is the approach we need to get full featured DEs, it's just unfortunate that that's how reality has worked out.
Of all that, I only care about fractional scaling. If I wanted Apple-like experience, I'd be using a Mac. Imitating Mac experience on different hardware can be a worthy goal, but it's definitely not the only worthy goal.
Probably 25 to 50% of the usefulness of a monitor is that you can show your neighbor what's on it. Also 3D gives the user headaches often, and you have to wear these huge goggles.
Finally, I have enough trouble wrangling windows and getting them to behave with two dimensions. A third dimension just adds a place where the windows can go that I don't want them to go.
Gnome doesn't work well for me unless I find a bunch of half maintained bug-ridden extensions to fix the problems that have it has and it still doesn't work properly.
KDE is perfect. It used to be slow but now it's not. It's very configurable but doesn't need it most of the time.
XFCE for many including myself is the ideal, and is not playing catch up. At least I hope it isn't.
I switched to a Mac temporarily recently. I had to install an additional app just so that I could tile my windows in a basic way that is already supported by KDE, windows, pretty much everyone else. They have alpha compositing and all that, but it still felt like a step backward.
Not everyone uses a nonlinear video editor for a living.
You know you're behind the curve when even Xfce is ahead of you.
I just use whatever GNOME offers and maybe 1-2 extensions. A few months ago I switched from Fedora to Debian 12 and barely noticed it. Thanks to GNOME and systemd, which I hate independently for various reasons.
I do feel like a sellout (but not getting paid).
Gnome made me deviate from the happy path with 3, I switched to where I was happy again, and haven't looked back since.
:shrug:
I mean, I do have NetworkManager, Blueman, Nautilus (file explorer), so why would I need a DE? I'm wondering if I'm missing something. (Honest question)
So Wayland++ can provide network transparency, but whenever a W++ feature has issues and those issues are criticized, Wayland advocates will just motte-and-bailey the issue by saying "but that's not part of Wayland!", which is technically true but irrelevant. "Wayland" can mean Wayland++ or just Wayland-core, depending on what's convenient.
x11 had long time become unsustainable in multiple ways
braking changes where inevitable
all of the most relevant DE had somewhat already gutted out X11 leaving nothing behind then the interfaces
so the replacement being defined by interfaces and "every DE for themself" was just natural, for the large DEs it was already the case anyway
and for the other DEs you could say wlroot is now the common core they need because they don't have the will/time to implement everything by themself
The protocol uses shared memory buffers and file descriptors, so it can't be just transported through TCP as-is. You need something like waypipe, which parses part of the protocol, extracts things like file descriptors that won't make sense on the other end, and then reconstructs things on the destination.
waypipe turns out not to be that complicated, it's just 15K lines of code.
Wayland should have shipped with a default implementation that had screen sharing, recording, clipboard and everything else that x11 had by default. The fact that they've thrown all that responsibility on DEs without so much as a HOWTO on how to reach parity is ridiculous. I will never understand why anyone took their effort seriously.
Well, all DEs (excepting maybe Xfce?) have members in the work groups that design the wayland protocol extensions, so it can be assumed that people are well aware of what needs to be done.
Wayland has a default implementation called Weston, but I'm not sure that any of its devs cared enough to implement the extensions which are responsible for all the other bits that you mentioned.
most software which did support network transparency in a way similar to what X11 started out with has giving up on it (like in the industry as a whole) and there seems to be a clear technical consensus that it's best to not to approach remote access this way, even in X11 it was kind of semi-abandoned long before X11 was semi abandoned (from developers not from people using it)
As far as I can tell from the POV of the discussion of weather Wayland (or any other hypothetical replacement) needs to support it the answer always had been a clear "no it doesn't need to, nor should it try to".
This doesn't mean that you can't have remote shared applications, desktops, screen sharing or similar just not using network transparency. I.e. not by pretending the things the application communicates with (compositor, GPU, etc.) are on the same computer and "transparently" routing (part of) them to a different computer. And if you consider the stark difference in latency, reliability and throughput between a Unix pipe/speaking to a GPU over PCIe and TCP over Ethernet it can feel surprising that it was ever considered to be a good idea (but then when X11 was build network transparency was just that big think people put into everything, from most of which it is removed by now).
So what replaces network transparency (and did replace it in many cases long before Wayland was relevant) is typical remote desktop functionality. I.e. and additional application will grab the mouse/keyboard input on one side and the rendered output on the other side and sends them to each other. This has many benefits both for the people not using it and the people using it while many of the drawbacks often practically do not make much of a difference anymore. The main issue is if there is a high quality open source for free program you can use and if it's installed on the system where you want to use it...
Sometimes because you want users to be able to change workstations, sometimes because you want a highly specific environment outside of the user's control (it can reset on each connection), sometimes because you want nothing to be kept locally. Eg, the country somebody works in is untrustworthy, so they access everything somewhere remote and safe.
and if you have no complex rendering requirements then often it's a much better choice to place the network gap in the GUI toolkit instead of the DM as this tends to work way better, in this case you do need a thin client on the other side, but so do you need for X11 remote (the client needs to run X11) so it's kinda not that difference. And today the easiest way to ship thin clients happens to be JS/WebGPU, which is how we have stuff like GTKs webrender backend.
Actually, it is. The actual straw that broke the X developers was font metrics, IIRC. Essentially, if you want to support fonts for the language of the most populous country on Earth, you need to do more or less complete font rendering to answer questions like "how long is this span of text going to be" (so that you can break it). And the X developers tried to make it work with the X model, but the only way they could get it to work well was to have the X server ship the font to the X client and the X client ships rendered bits back to the X server [even over the network!].
this use case is broken in X11 since a very long time, because to make this work well you don't just need some form of network transparency in the network manager but also remote rendering for OpenGL and Vulcan
> Software rendering is a regression t
But in most cases it's not happening, because you don't render on the server for most applications you render on a client which interacts with a server.
> and Javascript apps seem to be the way the industry is avoiding it (with the browser as a remote display server).
Today many JS apps are not thin clients they are often quite complete applications, but lets ignore that for a moment.
I'm not sure what exactly you are imagining, but as far as I can tell the only way to make this kind of remote rendering you are implying work in general would be by making X11 a GUI toolkit with some form of cross OS stable interface and it also would be the only supported GUI toolkit and any fancy GPU rendering (e.g. games) would fundamentally not work. There is just no way this would ever have worked.
The reason the industry mostly abandoned network transparency not just for remote display servers but also in most other places is because it's just not working well in practice. Even many of the places which do still use network transparency (e.g. network file systems) dent to run into unexpected issues due software happen to not work well with the changed reliability/latency/throughput characteristics this introduces.
The internet suggests increasing the responsiveness checker or disabling it entirely, but that makes Firefox unresponsive to mouse input.
Waypipe does have some great hardware acceleration advantages over remote X11 sessions, but for me it's currently not usable.
In any case ssh -X still works fine out of the box, using which transparently uses XWayland behind the scene.
It has limitations compared to native Wayland like good support for multi screen with different DPIs, but the same limitations will be found in a native X11 session anyway.
So Wayland is at least not a downgrade on this topic. It's been handled well.
It still has abysmal performance (and many other issues), though. I've been using Xpra for a while now, to at least let programs survive if my connection is interrupted. Makes it possible to work from a train or conference Wi-Fi.
waypipe has good performance, but IIRC it suffers from the same disconnection issue. Hopefully recent work from KDE on surviving a compositor restart means that restarting a waypipe session will be possible, or even juste deciding to forward a program after starting it (which wouldn't be possible with X).
One could also imagine exposing a window to both local and remote compositors (could be implemented in waypipe), with simultaneous access leveraging Wayland multiseat. "Multiplayer" compositing.
I also use ssh -X a lot from home to work and performance is sufficient. Xpra shows that it could also work over low latency links if you have latency hiding which the X supports but because it is asynchronous but - again - toolkits never bothered. Fixing these issues would be a million times more useful than redeveloping everything from scratch.
Sure, in that case you could even switch back-ends and have your toolkit interrupt its connection with X and start talking with GBM/DRM, Wayland, or another X server. However, the required changes would likely be invasive. I get your point though, this is relatively similar to Wayland programs surviving compositor restarts. However, you would need to start tracking all the state that the X server tracks, to replay it later. Not impossible, but quite hard to bottle on existing implementations, I think.
> Fixing these issues would be a million times more useful than redeveloping everything from scratch
That's your opinion. In my opinion, Wayland does a lot of things right; the main one being a specification that everyone can implement. That makes it much easier to start from scratch to implement an innovative feature in a proof-of-concept toy compositor or program. We've seen a lot of these projects, and consolidation takes time. Once proven, features tend to trickle down to general purpose compositors.
I am really satisfied with the tools Wayland has given us, from gamescope to nested compositors, better isolation, better-behaved clients (no more clients that refuse to go fullscreen, etc), a very stable experience with few crashes (compared to misbehaving clients taking down the X server with them), easy multiseat, no more tearing, no more xorg.conf, better client isolation (notably remote apps cannot spy on locally-running apps), pipewire-based screensharing, choose-your-own-compositor-features approach (granted, not for everyone; but those uncomfotable can stick with KDE or GNOME).
The future seems promising, mostly thanks to wlr protocols, especially wlr-layer-shell that should allow running UI elements from a DE on other compatible compositors (I can't wait to use xfce4-panel on sway starting from their next release[1]).
> I also use ssh -X a lot from home to work and performance is sufficient
Personally, I ran into issues with Cadence, even on a LAN: that software uses some X toolkit, and some very long lists (scrollable form-like dialog) took dozen of seconds to display; I also had various font issues, issues with software moving my mouse (I hate this), performance issues with complex drawings. Most of these disappeared when running through Xpra. Not to mention losing my work because of small internet cuts, putting my computer to sleep, or having the ssh connection interrupted somehow (ssh has trouble with roaming, connecting over wireguard helps with that).
> Xpra shows that it could also work over low latency links if you have latency hiding which the X supports but because it is asynchronous but - again - toolkits never bothered
This is getting too technical, I don't think I'm qualified to discuss this. Though don't you mean high latency links? Xpra is basically a local X server that sends data with a protocol similar to VNC. It is quite similar to how Waypipe handles things. I may be wrong on this, but I think RDP may combine the best of both worlds? Dumb "vnc-like" connection by default, and make use of optimized implementations in the toolkits when available.
[1]: https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/-/merge_requests/10...
>> Xpra shows that it could also work over low latency links if you have latency hiding which the X supports but because it is asynchronous but - again - toolkits never bothered
>This is getting too technical, I don't think I'm qualified to discuss this. Though don't you mean high latency links?
Yes, of course.
>Xpra is basically a local X server that sends data with a protocol similar to VNC. It is quite similar to how Waypipe handles things. I may be wrong on this, but I think RDP may combine the best of both worlds? Dumb "vnc-like" connection by default, and make use of optimized implementations in the toolkits when available.
I do not think you will every get good client integration as good as X with dumb protocols and my experience with RDP was always relatively poor. Xpra uses its own protocol between two proxys but supports good integration so is different to a stupid screen scraping approach, but I think it could just work by doing the latency handling on the client and speaking directly to a remote X server using X. The reason that I believe that would be possible is that X is a very flexible remote buffer handling protocol. So caching of some image content and copying it around could all be done remotely controlled by the client. I started to implement something like this but then did not have time... But the flexibility and extend-ability of X is also the reason I think that throwing it away is completely unnecessary.
Is it the way like this? is there any workaround? Could someone please enlighten me?
Have you tried opening a bug with them to see if just got broke in your display manager?